Yesterday, we celebrated Purim. I’ll share a secret: I hate the holiday. Or rather, I’ve long hated how we celebrate it. I don’t like costumes. And the carnival spirit set against a story that ends with 75,000 dead — even if killed in justified self-defense — has troubled me for years. 

Despite my feeling about our celebrations, the Book of Esther, the holiday’s core text, is among the most finely crafted works in the Tanach, especially as a work of political theory, a reflection on power, complicity, protest and survival under an unjust regime. That’s why I embrace the traditional practice of reading it carefully every year.  

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Amid the new and unfolding war in Iran and challenges around the world, the Book of Esther is a story even more relevant for our times. King Ahasuerus, often portrayed as a bumbling, inept ruler whose inattention, if not outright perfidy, enables his deputies to commit unspeakable evils on the masses, could have been drawn from current world headlines. Whether in countries where brave citizens risk imprisonment or worse to protest repression or in democracies veering towards authoritarianism, the story of a leader unbounded by the rule of law feels painfully familiar. Against that political backdrop, the text offers two models of response: Vashti and Esther. One of protest that is often ineffectual but morally pure, and another of effective strategic action that often springs from self-interest rather than moral courage.  

The prophetic voice of Vashti 

The story opens with Vashti, the queen, refusing the king’s command to appear in her royal diadem “to display her beauty” before officials at a party. Our tradition reads the command as an order to appear wearing only the diadem; she refuses his order. 

In response, Vashti is banished. Advisers warn that leniency would inspire other wives to defy their husbands. We never hear from her again. 

Though not a Jew, Vashti embodies the courage of the Jewish prophets: speaking truth to power, insisting on the equal dignity of every person and doing so at great personal cost. 

The rub: her actions change nothing. In fact, they make matters worse. In response to her refusal, the king decrees that men shall take authority in every household.?Moral clarity is real, and so are its limits. 

Enter Esther 

When the king stages a public search for a new queen — effectively a beauty contest — Esther, concealing her Jewish identity, is chosen. She enters the palace fully complicit with the terms that Vashti rejected. 

Esther thus enters the story as a compromised insider, willing to dance at the ball, as it were, for proximity to luxury if not power. When Haman, one of the king’s senior officials, takes offense because Modechai the Jew won’t bow in deference to his authority, Haman persuades the king to issue a genocidal decree against the Jews. 

Unknown to Haman, Mordechai is Esther’s cousin, but she does not even notice or rush to protest. Uninterested in speaking truth to power, she explains to Mordechai that anyone who approaches the king unsummoned risks death.?Preferring to live in the comfort of the palace walls, she refuses to risk her own life to save the lives of thousands of others.  

Only after Mordechai challenges her, reminding her that the palace walls will not serve as protection if her people are destroyed, does Esther act. She does not sign petitions or issue public statements. Nor does she send notes to the far reaches of the kingdom that help is on the way. She patiently waits and strategizes. She fasts, then plans, holding two banquets to build trust and lower defenses, and then reveals herself to the King as a Jew subject to the same decree, ultimately saving her people from annihilation. 

If Vashti represents the prophetic protestor, Esther, often viewed more charitably, represents what sociologist Max Weber called political ethics, or an “ethic of responsibility”: a leader who puts the responsibility for a community ahead of their own moral purity. We see these two models as well in Iran today, where some challenge the regime openly while others work quietly as civil servants protecting the vulnerable and insiders working from within. We also see it in Israel and in the United States, and wherever imperfect people navigate flawed systems to prevent something worse. 

Neither method is pure. Protest preserves moral clarity, but is also often ineffective and can provoke backlash. Strategic silence operating behind the scenes can often produce results, but also breed complicity. 

We need both models 

The Book of Esther does not declare a winner or a “right” way. Let’s not forget that but for Vashti’s morally self righteous refusal, Esther would never have had the opportunity.  With the two heroines, Vashti establishes the moral throughline of the story. Without her refusal of the King, Esther’s strategy would have no baseline to measure against. 

What if all Vashtis were as politically effective as Esther? What if all Esthers were as morally pure as Vashti? Today, we need both: the morally exacting witness who speaks truth to power and pays the price, leaving behind a powerful framework of moral integrity and the historical record that we were not all complicit. And we need the insider who may only be motivated by self-interest or preservation, but whose actions place the responsibility of the community ahead of their own moral purity.?  

At a moment when political communities we love wield state violence against those least able to defend themselves, whether abroad or here at home, there is no perfect path. Some will choose Vashti. Others, Esther. Both choices carry risk, but both are necessary. Both are urgent. 

So as we pray for peace and an end to the lawlessness of our times, amid global struggles over civil liberties, equality and state power, we must make room for Vashti at the table as well as for Esther, because one needs the other — moral clarity and moral consequence.

Andrew Rehfeld is the president of Hebrew Union College.